The customer service process has conventionally occurred by face-to-face contact. The current customer service process involves the use of telephone, fax, e-mail, pager and other mechanisms in an unstructured end-to-end process, which takes time on the consumer end and consumes both time and money on the company end due to the inefficiencies involved. Another problem with the current process is that oftentimes, a customer has to search to find the appropriate contact information for a company or organization and sometimes when they find the contact information, it's not guaranteed that this particular contact will be able to solve their problems. In fact, they may be referred to another individual within the company; thus the cycle begins again. The increase in computer ownership and in widespread use of the Internet, makes feasible the collection of information, for example, customer comments, via computer networks and related communication networks.
Additionally, the majority of information on the web today is qualitative—text, discussion forums, and other information that is hard to rapidly analyze and act upon. The full potential of the web as a real time quantitative knowledge acquisition and processing tool for businesses, organizations and even consumers has yet to be realized.